Growing up in a Mennonite family in Inverness, Idaho back in the forties and fifties, John Reisender takes to wondering. Why had Great-grandma been married in a Muslim mosque way hell and gone out in the wilds of Central Asia? On the road to solving this perplexity, he finds himself excommunicated, temporarily, from the family religion. He discovers how his maternal grandfather escaped Czarist Russia, acts as an undertaker for a cat's funeral, takes a crash course in Nietzsche from the keeper of the city dump, escapes drowning, becomes an unsung, accidental semi-hero in a high school football game, cheats death on a spelunking expedition, and